Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “The tunnel turned out to be much wider than it appeared from the outside. They.”

— R.F. Kuang

452. “To be fair, their fights were tabled rather than resolved. They had not really confronted the reasons why they’d fallen out, but they were all willing to blame it on stress. There would be a time when they had to face up to their very real differences, when they would hash things out instead of always changing the subject, but for now they were content to enjoy the summer and to remember again what it was like to love one another.”

— R.F. Kuang

453. “The Hermes Society took silver only in amounts small enough to mask with some accounting trickery, for the virtue of a humanities faculty, Griffin explained, was that everyone was hopeless with numbers.”

— R.F. Kuang

454. “Pick one? Just one, of all these treasures?”

— R.F. Kuang

455. “I’ve written myself into a corner. The first two-thirds of the book were a breeze to compose, but what do I do with the ending? Where do I leave my protagonist, now that there’s a hungry ghost in the mix, and no clear resolution?”

— R.F. Kuang

456. “It all reeks of desperation, but I can’t look away. It’s the only thing linking me to the only world I have any interest in being at part of.”

— R.F. Kuang

457. “Most authors would confess they hear an inner editor, an internal naysayer that hampers and nitpicks their attempts at first drafts. Mine has taken the form of Athena. Haughtily she peruses and dismisses every story idea I attempt: “too trite”, “too formulaic”, “too white”. She’s even harsher at the sentence level: “the rhythm’s off”, “that imagery doesn’t work”, “seriously, another em dash?”

— R.F. Kuang

458. “Order is present in the earthly kingdom when all beings understand their place. All beings understand their place when they fulfill roles set out for them. The fish does not attempt to fly. The polecat does not attempt to swim. Only when each being respects the heavenly order may there be peace.”

— R.F. Kuang

459. “It’s so important to think about what perspectives aren’t embraced by Anglophone readers, you know? We must make space for the subaltern voices, the suppressed narratives.”

— R.F. Kuang

460. “The price of power is pain.”

— R.F. Kuang

461. “Jiang moved through the world like he didn’t belong there. He acted as if he came from a country of near-humans, people who acted almost exactly like Nikara but not quite, and his behavior was that of a confused visitor who had stopped bothering with trying to imitate those around him.”

— R.F. Kuang

462. “Ah. The law.” Jiang sniffed at an unidentified leaf and then tossed it away. “So inconvenient. So irrelevant.”

— R.F. Kuang

463. “But we are the weaker party. We have no choice but to play their game. That’s how power works.”

— R.F. Kuang

464. “This was only grotesque if she saw her opponents as humans. But she didn’t see humans, because Sinegard and Altan had taught her to compartmentalize and detach. Learn to look and see not a man but a body. The soul is not there. The body is simply a composite of different targets, and all of them burn so bright.”

— R.F. Kuang

465. “She felt like a little rodent burrowing down in its hole, trying to pretend that if it lay low enough, the the world outside wouldn’t bother it.”

— R.F. Kuang

466. “I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.”

— R.F. Kuang

467. “We could escape to the New World,’ Ramy proposed. ‘Go to Canada.’ ‘You don’t even speak French,’ Letty said. ‘It’s French, Letty.’ Ramy rolled his eyes. ‘Latin’s flimsiest daughter. How hard could it be?”

— R.F. Kuang

468. “It was like an exercise in hope’, she said after a pause. ‘Loving her, I mean. Sometimes I’d think she’d come around. Sometimes I’d look her in the eyes and think that I was looking at a true friend. Then she’d say something, make some off-the-cuff comment, and the whole cycle would begin all over again. It was like pouring sand into a sieve. Nothing stuck.”

— R.F. Kuang

469. “And it strikes me as very convenient that shortly after her death, you come out with a book about the very same subject.”

— R.F. Kuang

470. “The thing about violence, see, is that the Empire has a lot more to lose than we do. Violence disrupts the extractive economy. You wreak havoc on one supply line, and there’s a dip in prices across the Atlantic. Their entire system of trade is high-strung and vulnerable to shocks because they’ve made it thus, because the rapacious greed of capitalism is punishing. It’s why slave revolts succeed. They can’t fire on their own source of labour – it’d be like killing their own golden geese.”

— R.F. Kuang

471. “Did you know they strapped him down and made him watch as they took the others apart to find out what made them tick? What are Speerlies made of? The Federation was determined to find out. Did you know they kept them alive as long as they could, even when they had peeled their flesh away from their rib cages, so they could see how their muscles moved while they were splayed out like rabbits.”

— R.F. Kuang

472. “She passed her time sleeping. She wanted to sleep all the time now, especially after meals, and when she did it was a heavy and dreamless sleep. She wondered if her food and drink were drugged. Somehow, she was almost grateful for this. It was worse to be alone with her thoughts.”

— R.F. Kuang

473. “Because you’re about to be the ones in power,” she says. “And because you never decentralize power once you’ve got it. I wouldn’t.” “Well, we all know you wouldn’t.” She gives him a look. “That’s not my cynicism, Nezha. That’s human nature.”

— R.F. Kuang

474. “Now she had nothing to do – her future was out of her hands, and knowing that made her feel far worse.”

— R.F. Kuang

475. “She’d seen the resentment on the faces of her people. The glare in their eyes when they dared to look up. They were not a people grasping for power. Their rebellion would not fracture over stupid personal ambitions. They were a people who refused to be killed, and that made them dangerous. You.”

— R.F. Kuang

476. “She suspected that he, too, wanted to suspend reality and break the rules, to ignore the fact that they were about to part forever and just share these last jugs of wine.”

— R.F. Kuang

477. “But as she and Rin had both discovered, the battles were easy. Destroying was easy. The hard part was the aftermath.”

— R.F. Kuang

478. “She would have torn apart kingdoms for this woman. She would have followed her to the gates of hell and back. This was her ruler. This was whom she was meant to serve.”

— R.F. Kuang

479. “She dressed him in finely embroidered silks and adorned him with so many lucky amulets of gold and jade that Mingzha clinked everywhere he walked, weighed down with the burden of good fortune. The palace servants liked to joke that they could always hear Mingzha before they saw him.”

— R.F. Kuang

480. “If it’s focus that you want, I can give you focus. I can concentrate on anything. But to empty my mind? To be devoid of all thought? All sense of self? What good does that serve?” “It serves to sever you from the material world,” Jiang answered. “How do you expect to reach the spirit realm when you’re obsessing over the things in front of you?”

— R.F. Kuang

481. “But maybe he hadn’t hated the gods. Maybe he’d just hated that he couldn’t access their power for himself.”

— R.F. Kuang

482. “Cities needed water to survive, just like bodies needed blood. So if they wanted to seize the Empire, they needed only to sail through its arteries.”

— R.F. Kuang

483. “Only he could determine the truth, because only he could communicate it to all parties.”

— R.F. Kuang

484. “Violence shows how much we’re willing to give up.”

— R.F. Kuang

485. “It was a good deal smaller than he’d remembered, or perhaps he’d just grown taller. The.”

— R.F. Kuang

486. “Your languages determine how interesting you are.”

— R.F. Kuang

487. “The Federation had fun. They made is a sport. They threw babies in the air to see if they could cleave them in half before they hit the ground. they had contests to see how many civilians they could round up and decapitate in an hour. they raced to see who could stack bodies the fastest.”

— R.F. Kuang

488. “Most authors are pickier about killing their darlings.”

— R.F. Kuang

489. “As a child she knew her motherland as a place of violence and barbaric power struggles, for that is how they spoke of it in France, and that was what her exiled mother chose to believe. ‘We are lucky,’ whispered her mother, ‘that we survived it.’ But her mother did not survive France.”

— R.F. Kuang

490. “Dying was easy. Living was so much harder – that was the most important lesson Altan had ever taught her.”

— R.F. Kuang

491. “She glanced down at the basin with a deranged satisfaction. Better to get the blood out this way, she thought, all at once, rather than slowly, every month, for years. While she continued to retch, she heard the door to the dormitory open. Someone walked inside and paused in front of her. “You’re insane,” said Venka. Rin glared up at her, blood dripping from her mouth, and smiled.”

— R.F. Kuang

492. “What you don’t get to do is to remain neutral.”

— R.F. Kuang

493. “She could not abide the terrible guilt of it, so she closed her mind off to the reality. She burned away the part of her that would have felt remorse for those deaths, because if she felt them, if she felt each and every single one of them, it would have torn her apart. The lives were so many that she ceased to acknowledge them for what they were.”

— R.F. Kuang

494. “She saw how scared he was, trapped and isolated in his own mind, watching his world break down around him because of irrationalities that he could not fix.”

— R.F. Kuang

495. “Her formidable mind retained information like a steel trap. She held grammar rules the way other women held grudges.”

— R.F. Kuang

496. “For God’s sake,’ snapped Professor Lovell. ‘She was only just a woman.”

— R.F. Kuang

497. “Show the world what they want; contort yourself into the image they want to see, because seizing control of the story is how you in turn control them.”

— R.F. Kuang

498. “Latin, translation theory, etymology, focus languages, and a new research language – it was an absurdly heavy class load, especially when each professor assigned coursework as if none of the other courses existed. The faculty was utterly unsympathetic.”

— R.F. Kuang

499. “The publisher might then hire a Black sensitivity reader to check whether the textual representations are consciously, or unconsciously, racist. They’ve gotten more and more popular in the past few years, as more and more white authors have been criticized for employing racist tropes and stereotypes.”

— R.F. Kuang

500. “At last he realized he was going about it all wrong. This was not Chinese. Griffin had merely used Chinese characters to convey words in a language Robin suspected was English.”

— R.F. Kuang